Face To Face With History

While Not Taking Blame, Some Young Germans Are Taking Responsibility

January 31, 1999|By Tammie Bob. Tammie Bob, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, teaches English at the College of DuPage.

Something about the newspaper article bothered me.

The story in the Tempo section of the July 31 Chicago Tribune featured 22-year-old Kathrin Ahnert of Eilenburg, Germany. Several years earlier, Ahnert had come upon an old family photograph in which her great-grandfather wore what was clearly a uniform of the SS, the notorious Nazi military unit that carried out Hitler's genocide policies during World War II. Until then, she had been ignorant of her family's life during the war and uninformed about the policies of the Nazi government. When her family refused to discuss the subject, Ahnert began a search for answers that ignited a passion for human rights, eventually bringing her to volunteer at the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in Skokie.

Rereading the article carefully, I noticed that her town was not far from the place in eastern Germany where my father, a concentration camp survivor, had grown up. Ahnert. Like an echo, the name brought to mind a sentence from my father's memoir: "If ever a scoundrel deserved a special place in hell, it was Ahnert." This Ahnert had been the Gestapo chief in my father's city and was, according to the memoir, a particularly vicious character in the saga of my father's capture and arrest.

Could that Ahnert be the man in Kathrin Ahnert's family picture? I reached for the phone, for a moment imagining a kind of poetic moment in which the descendants of two bitter enemies meet 55 years later, a continent away, and clear up old mysteries.

Then I hesitated. If I could enlighten Ahnert about her mysterious ancestor, would she want to know what I had to tell? "Your great-grandfather may have been a sadistic thug who gleefully carried out Hitler's anti-Jewish policies." Who would welcome information like that? Nevertheless, I made the call.

In the end, we determined that my father's Ahnert was not the man in Kathrin Ahnert's family picture, although it's possible that he was related to her. "It's not that common a name in the area," Ahnert said. But the incident outlines the dilemma that confronts young Germans two or more generations removed from the Nazi era. They might simply ignore the past and move on. That is not the path that Ahnert has chosen. By working in Holocaust education, among aging survivors of that catastrophe, she takes responsibility for the past crimes of others, and actively promotes conciliation so that such disasters might not happen again. "I think for the third generation (after World War II) it is much easier to approach this topic since we didn't actually live in it and we weren't directly touched by it," she said.

While Ahnert's actions may place her high on the scale of moral and social activism, they are not unique. Hundreds of other young Germans are involved in similar projects, four of them in Chicago. From speaking with them, it seems that education, the right kind of education, can have profound results.

These young adults are in Chicago under the auspices of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. Founded in 1958 by German clergymen who had actively resisted the Nazi regime, the group sends volunteers to do service work in countries that suffered at the hands of Germany during World War II.

While each volunteer comes to the program through a unique set of circumstances, male participants are often conscientious objectors who may fulfill their military obligation with 12 months of civilian social service at home or abroad. The young adults in ARSP extend that commitment to 18 months. As a woman, Ahnert is not subject to conscription. Her decision to participate in the program is based entirely upon her ideals.

Clearly these articulate, knowledgeable, inquisitive people are not "average" young adults, but their individual experiences indicate a conscious national effort to come to terms with the atrocities of the past. Deeply interested in intercultural human relations, they desire both to better the world and to alter the lingering negative perception of Germans.

"As a German, when you travel abroad, like in England or Spain, for instance, you can expect unfriendly encounters all the time. . . . People are blaming you for the war, or they act like they do. Eventually you get used to it," noted Daniel Schwenger, 22, of Altsdorf, near Stuttgart.

ARSP places its volunteers where they have ample opportunity to discuss the past and represent contemporary Germany in a positive way. Ahnert's colleagues include Schwenger, who is completing a stint at Chicago's Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and Jan Schultheiss, who works in the Jewish Selfhelp Home for the Aged, a residential facility populated mostly by elderly German Jews, many of them survivors of the Holocaust. And Arndt Husar is at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Wicker Park agency dealing with environmental, transportation and social issues.